The ranch is where she goes to get work done.

Published 1:38 pm, Monday, July 17, 2017

Meg Guerra poses for a headshot outside her ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Meg Guerra poses for a headshot outside her ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Photo: Danny Zaragoza / LMT

Image 2 of 10

Exterior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Exterior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Photo: Danny Zaragoza/Laredo Morning Times

Image 3 of 10

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Photo: Danny Zaragoza/Laredo Morning Times

Image 4 of 10

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Photo: Danny Zaragoza/Laredo Morning Times

Image 5 of 10

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Photo: Danny Zaragoza/Laredo Morning Times

Image 6 of 10

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Photo: Danny Zaragoza/Laredo Morning Times

Image 7 of 10

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Photo: Danny Zaragoza/Laredo Morning Times

Image 8 of 10

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Photo: Danny Zaragoza/Laredo Morning Times

Image 9 of 10

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Interior view of Meg Guerra's ranch home in San Ygnacio, Texas on Tuesday, June 27, 2017.

Photo: Danny Zaragoza/Laredo Morning Times

Image 10 of 10

Meg Guerra’s calling

1 / 10

Back to Gallery

On a June morning at her ranch outside San Ygnacio, Meg Guerra makes a pot of coffee but doesn't drink it. She's sitting where she will sometimes work, on a bench at a folding table she has set up in her freestanding porch, looking out on screened-in 360-degree views.

There's the main house with the blue trim and the yellow hearth, the books and the wall of photos depicting her family through the years at this ranch. There's the casita where her grandchildren sleep when they visit, with peaceful white walls. There's the horse, and there's the monte, and there's the entrance to Santa Maria Ranch.

This is where Guerra likes to write, but it's also where she likes to work with her hands.

"The ranch has always been a place where you just got to work out whatever it was that was in your heart or on your conscience," she said.

Guerra, by the way, is impossibly eloquent. She says things like this off the cuff:

"There's something about working in silence. And I'm talking about being outside, doing physical work, fixing a fence, tending to an animal, painting a gate. Whatever it is, there's this inner dialogue, this unwinding of the thing you're being beset with. And it's the birdsong, it's the coyotes in the evening. Whatever it is, there's a way that this place just works on you and tries to make you whole."

This unwinding at Santa Maria takes place in Guerra's writing too. This ranch is where she wrote much of LareDOS, the infamous alternative newspaper that served Laredo for 20 years, from 1994 to 2014.

LareDOS was a monthly publication best known for taking on the city's political and environmental foibles with biting humor and unrestrained reporting.

Guerra's stories almost always graced the front page, though less prominently once she got more contributors on board. Her headline on LareDOS' first issue was "Drugs, Lies & Videotape in Zapata," the story of how former County Judge Jose Luis Guevara was brought down by the FBI and DEA. Guevara was caught red-handed facilitating a cocaine transport through Zapata's airport, and even filled up the plane's gas tank himself, Guerra said. The county sheriff and county clerk were arrested as well.

Guerra tackled a wide range of topics over the years, from LISD's questionable spending habits ("Splendid LISD expenditures may forge policy change," June 1995) to numerous instances of negligence or malevolence regarding the local environment ("Enjoy Lake Casa Blanca before development degrades this eco-treasure," September 2004). But there were also human interest stories, and articles about volunteer groups or artists or soldiers doing good things for their community.

"We used cartoons for years to kind of roast people. If they were being pompous, we showed them as such. And of course we recognized good people too. We weren't just about slapping people around," Guerra said.

Wanda Garner Cash, former associate director at the UT School of Journalism and past president of the Texas Press Association, grew up with Guerra in Laredo and roomed with her while they were both attending the University of Texas. They remain lifelong friends, and have both written prolifically along the way. Cash was actually the editor of their high school newspaper, The Pony Express, the year after Guerra's editorship. Guerra said that as children the two were "the most 'traviesas' people ... we were skunks."

Cash wasn't living in town during LareDOS' heyday, but heard plenty about the publication from miles away. Some said Guerra was a troublemaker, others that she was a crusader, a watchdog or an advocate for the disenfranchised. Cash said she thinks all these things are true.

"But more than that I think LareDOS gave the community the power to take back the political system in Laredo. They suddenly realized because of Meg's reporting that citizens had a right to demand accountability from their elected officials," Cash said. "I think the best thing LareDOS did was empower people to hold government accountable."

When LareDOS ended in September 2014, Guerra was sick with cancer, though she didn't know it yet. But she also had interests outside journalism, and grandchildren, and she just decided that it was a good time to end the paper.

"Something was happening to my energy that I wasn't sure about. So the paper changed as I changed. I've never stopped loving writing. I've never stopped wanting to write good stories. I've always been engaged when I'm writing. But I think I was seeing that there were other things in the world that I wanted to be interested in," Guerra said.

After her diagnosis, treatments and blood transfusions brought her back to life, Guerra said, but by the time she was getting healthy again, LareDOS was already shuttered.

With many of her larger life decisions, Guerra will admit she needs someone to push her through the door. To bring LareDOS back as an online publication, that pusher was Cash.

"I gave her a swift kick in the butt in the nicest way possible," Cash said.

When Guerra began feeling better, Cash said her friend became restless. She said Guerra needed to take her newfound energy and get back to what she does best: reporting.

Cash recommended Guerra take LareDOS online so she wouldn't have to deal with the logistics and costs of printing and distributing, which Guerra said were very cumbersome. She remembers times when the paper was finished and ready for publication, but they had no money to get it out.

So around February of this year, LareDOS[redux] debuted online.

Much like LareDOS' first iteration, the online publication has lots of Guerra in it. She has also rounded up some of her old writers and other people who are interested in contributing.

There are guest columns, reviews, histories, even fiction, and of course news, which Guerra writes most of. Recently she reported on the city's demolition of two downtown properties to build metered parking lots. But the story also explored the surrounding block: the historic Southern Hotel next door, and the conversion of a nearby property into affordable housing for the elderly.

Guerra said that she doesn't consider what she does journalism, unless she is truly only going over data.

"What I really like doing is telling a larger story. I may give you data and facts in a story, but I think what I really intend to do is to engage the reader in thinking, 'Well how do I feel about this? What am I going to do about it?'" she said.

LareDOS came back just in time for the FBI to raid a handful of city and county government buildings at the end of April as part of a public corruption probe. Guerra was the first news source to report on the contents of the search warrant for City Hall, which included a list of elected officials and others named as "target subjects," and laid out the FBI's intention to gather records relating to Dannenbaum Engineering, a firm that has worked with the city on several multimillion-dollar contracts.

LareDOS is infamous for its unforgiving political cartoons and collages. The day she published the story about the search warrants, Guerra also uploaded a photo of City Hall with an illustrated Christmas tree planted in front, titled "O Dannenbaum, O Dannenbaum." The colorful ornaments on the tree say things like "No RFQs," "Make a deal" and "Christmas year round." Below the tree is a giant brown rat with a looming cartoon thought bubble: "Why wasn't I a target subject?"

Guerra's relationship to city business changed soon after she ended LareDOS' print run. In April 2015, Guerra's son, attorney George Altgelt, won a special election for City Council District VII. His predecessor was recalled from office for allegedly offering cocaine to an off-duty Border Patrol agent at a northside bar. Altgelt spearheaded the recall election.

Guerra conceded that it is odd to write about city business while her son serves on council. She's careful not to write about him, but in May, when he proposed that the city's park personnel stop maintaining baseball and softball fields for the local Pony League, and he was subsequently berated by parents and coaches for an hour, Guerra said she had to write about it.

"But he's his own guy," she said. "I think he does a lot of good things for his district and for the city. I think he's smart that way. Yeah, I'm real careful. I don't want to quote him and make him sound like the smartest person on the council. There are other smart people on the council — not too many, but there are others."

In her years covering the city, county, school districts, and general Laredo goings-on, Guerra isn't sure that her stubborn coverage provoked any real change, though she admits these entities "stopped doing that outrageous stuff," like the explicit and recorded malfeasance at LISD that she reported on in the '90s.

"At the end of 2014 when I closed it, I had a moment of looking back and trying to understand if anything had really changed. I know I had changed — I had changed a lot. But I can't say that business as usual shut down everywhere and that people, because we were there, behaved better with public money. I can't say that at all. I hope they did," Guerra said.

The area where Guerra feels she made the most impact is the local environment. When LareDOS started up, the Rio Grande was essentially a dump where people emptied cement trucks and tossed tires, Guerra said.

Also, after NAFTA was signed, American companies manufacturing in Mexico would bring their waste back to the U.S. to be treated. Barrels filled with various dangerous chemicals wound up in the sun and rain outside of the warehouses on Mines Road and Santa Maria, and some began to rust and seep. So Guerra and LareDOS' other founder, photographer Richard Geissler, documented and published this negligence.

"We were really happy that our advocacy ended up doing that. And then RGISC actually has been in on all the environmental ordinances: the green space ordinance, of course the plastic bag ordinance, the prevention of spraying (herbicides) on the river. My affiliation with RGISC has been a long one," Guerra said.

When it's all said and done, Guerra would like to write a memoir. And there are two things she wants to write about: Santa Maria Ranch and LareDOS.

"Because in ways I can't even explain to myself, they're so connected. Writing the newspaper out here, without any distraction, that was great," she said.

Guerra also aspires to write more fiction and short stories. All would take place at her ranch, Laredo or Zapata. She already has some fiction in an anthology published recently by UT Press, "Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art."

In her daily life, just in speaking with people, Guerra said she hears kernels of short stories all the time. Plus, she wants to write a novel about Laredo.

"All at once, it's this really loving, tender place that has huge moments of ridiculousness and big disparities of have and have not. ... All of that and the people who hold offices here, all of that lends itself to a novel — a great novel," Guerra said.

So with all of these plans to write a memoir and more fiction, why get back into reporting? Why bring back LareDOS?

"I just love words. I love what happens when you put them together. I love storytelling. When I was little I thought I would be like a rocket journalist. I'd be carving paths through big news stories. But I like what I do — it's so human. Yeah, it would have been nice to be on the cutting edge of a big political scandal on a national level, but in some ways, that just wasn't a leap I was going to make. So then I dabbled and I found my 'nicho,' my place. And I like my nicho. It's a good place to be."

Then, the next day, Guerra stuck this at the end of a casual email:

"I'm at an age where the landscape before me isn't just filled with current events. It's a big view that invites introspection about the meaning of events, relationships, and places that formed me, that helped me find my writer's voice. I don't dwell on them as much as I find comfort in them. There are markers that tell me I've had a good life as a journalist."

Julia Wallace may be reached at 956-728-2543 or jwallace@lmtonline.com